Tamil Brahmans have been central to the formation of new canons for classical music and dance since the 1930s. Brahmans also constitute the bulk of the students and the audiences of the classical performing arts in Chennai. Yet the prospect of an official award of distinction to TM Krishna at the forthcoming December music season at the Chennai Music Academy has brought howls of disgust from fellow musicians many of whom are refusing to perform at the Academy. The fact that Krishna dares to both excel at music and openly discuss and open up the narrow caste basis for classical music is denounced as an insult to musicians and to the spirituality of the music. Meanwhile there has been an attempt by some dance scholars to redeem the figure of Rukmini Devi, a Brahman woman who was central to the creation of a cleansed and spiritual classical dance in the 20th c.. Recuperating her from what is now a solid body of work that evaluates her in terms of her caste position, the scholars celebrate her cosmopolitanism and modernity as a recuperation of female agency from a narrow reduction to origins. In the first example, the foregrounding of caste in the sphere of aesthetics arouses disgust, in the second, it arouses disgust in the more diluted form of distaste. But can disgust also afford us a guide to understanding caste (and this applies equally to class) as something more than a sociological category? Using the powerful affects of disgust and of pleasure, and drawing on my family history as Tamil Brahmans steeped in music, the paper asks if we can develop an analytics of power that can sustain a non-reductive engagement with aesthetics.

Kalpana Ram is currently Visiting Professor of Anthropology at Australian National University. She has taught courses on power and performance in India, on social movements, postcolonial feminism as well as phenomenology for many years at Macquarie University, Sydney. Her research in India falls into two areas: the relationship between dance, music and nationalism as well as migration and gender in relation to dance. She has published extensively on dance as well as music in journals and edited volumes and this seminar is also a thread from her forthcoming publication, an essay in the Oxford Handbook of Indian Dance: Transnational Routes, eds. P. Purkayastha and A. Banerji, Oxford University Press, Oxford. A much larger body of her work has been based on research in fishing and agricultural Dalit groups in Tamil Nadu, south India, addressing questions of the relationship between embodied experience and agency, particularly for women. Her book Fertile Disorder: Spirit Possession and its Provocation of the Modern (University of Hawai'i Press, 2013) effects a synthesis of ethnography with the many areas to which she has contributed extensively: postcolonial theory, feminist theory, anthropology and phenomenology.